the ceremony was held in his quarters in a low-ceilinged, all but deserted room. At about this time he started visiting instructors in the art of the pipa (a sort of Chinese lute). They gradually put him back on his feet and one of them—a blind man who was both a musician and a soothsayer and whose word was respected as an oracle by the population of Peking as well as in the realm of martial arts—predicted his future, a prediction that remained confidential with the exception of one sentence: “The flame of your life will be extinguished at the age of seventy-one.” From that day Zai Lan adopted this number as a nickname, as if trying to master his own destiny. A neutral nickname with no social or political complexion, but sufficiently mysterious for some to perceive it as a code name for a clandestine anti-Western organisation which would go on to be a driving force in the Boxer Rising years later.
As well as for the pipa, Seventy-one earned a tremendous reputation in the art of falconry; each of his eagles, bred from pure royal strains, wore a bell attached to one foot, and this would ring even when the bird was invisible, flying one or two hundred metres above Peking. He used his own money to publish a work called The Art of Falconry, written in delicious rhyming verse in the same style as nomadic songs. Always respecting the rules of alliteration (according to which the two or four lines constituting each rhyme have to begin with the same sound), he guides us one step at a time through a vast field: he examines the vitreous body of the eagles eye with a magnifying glass, analyses their sight and the colour changes in their feathers, studies the best places to train and fly them, the influence of meteorological conditions and warm and cold airstreams, gives details of their diet, which must not include pork, and explains how to prepare meat for them, including how it must be stewed in spring and autumn; he establishes medical diagnoses based on the colour of their droppings, indicates relevant remedies copied from old books … A fascinating work, even in the censored version amputated of the chapter on the art of divination based on interpreting eagles’ flight, probably learned from his blind pipa instructor. During the Boxer Rising, which erupted in 1900, various collaborators of Western powers thought they detected a coded language in his book, claiming the rebels used a sort of mnemonic process taking the rhymes at the beginning of each phrase to memorise orders from their superiors and transmit them by word of mouth so that no written message could ever fall into enemy hands. When it comes to finding a scapegoat, human imagination knows no limits.
Seventy-one’s personality [the historian goes on in such a professorial tone that I felt I could almost hear his voice ringing round a lecture theatre] is a perfect illustration of what is known in psychoanalysis as the frustration complex. Like every frustration, the one he experienced at the age of thirteen engendered aggression. Granted, he never attacked his great-aunt Cixi, remaining loyal to her to the end, as required by the Confucian moral code, but he demonstrated violent tendencies when he met Cixi’s new allies, the Westerners, and this coincided with the hostility the whole country displayed towards enemy powers at the end of the nineteenth century Seventy-one used to send his sovereign reports about crimes committed by European missionaries, and some of these were circulated at Court and spread widely through the streets of the city On the strength of the injustice he had suffered and his legendary marginal status, Seventy-one became so popular that, when the Boxer crisis struck, Cixi asked for his help and appointed him as a senior member of the State Council to act as an intermediary between herself and the rebels. At the end of this blood-soaked episode, the eight Western powers—including Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia—invaded Peking again; history was repeating itself: acts of revenge, palaces ransacked, pillage, arson, rape and the signature of a peace treaty. In the text of the treaty, between the first article (in which China was to concede a significant portion of territory to each of the eight allied countries) and the third (stating there would be astronomical payments), the second focused exclusively on the personal fate of Seventy-one: Chinese government authorities undertook to condemn Prince Zai Lan, senior member